The ability to alert and mobilize first responders is central to the readiness of any public safety agency. In the aftermath of recent major public safety events, including natural and man-made disasters, the public safety community has thoroughly examined all aspects of wireless interoperable voice communications. However, first responder alerting has remained largely unexamined for over a decade, and in communities relying on volunteer first responders, the critical importance of first responder alerting rivals that of interoperable voice communications.
Shortcomings with current alerting technologies are well documented in the public record. One analysis of communication failure during periods of profound crisis, the Arlington County After-Action Report on the Response to the September 11 Terrorist attack on the Pentagon available from Arlington County, Virginia, notes failures in all forms of communications, from initial alerting to tactical voice communication. As stated in this report, during the events of Sep. 11, 2001, radio channels became oversaturated, and interoperability problems among jurisdictions and agencies persisted throughout the entire response process. Otherwise compatible portable radios were preprogrammed in a manner that precluded interoperability. Cellular telephone systems and even the public switched telephone network (PSTN) became congested and unusable.
This report cited traditional, 1-way paging systems as the most reliable method of alerting and notification. However, the lack of a paging response channel left responders relying on other, less reliable forms of communication to escalate, reply to, or even confirm receipt of their instructions. These problems with cellular telephone networks and the PSTN limited the overall effectiveness of 1-way paging as an alerting system. This created serious operational challenges during the Sep. 11, 2001 series of events, and they will create similar problems in any such future events.
Even during day-to-day public safety activity, these alerting system limitations are problematic. In most cases, when volunteer groups are alerted by pager, incident commanders do not know who will actually respond until personnel begin to arrive on scene. This delay postpones decisions regarding escalation and mutual aid, letting critical time slip by before commanders can identify and correct problems with the response. This time period can define the success or failure of the response process, presenting a critical need for simple, inexpensive, pager-type devices that can reply to group messages.
However, public safety agencies still rely on 25-year old, 1-way paging technology as their core alerting solution. Many newer technologies are available, but for alerting, for a variety of reasons, these technologies do not provide a meaningful improvement over 1-way paging. Existing mobile data systems are too expensive and too bulky for continual personal use. Digital and analog 2-way voice systems are similarly impractical for widespread, continuous deployment to volunteer forces. Several contemporary PCS technologies have integrated voice, data, and paging, but their complete dependence on commercial networks runs counter to commonly accepted reliability standards (e.g., NFPA-1221). Private broadband solutions (such as IEEE 802.11 and 802.16) provide high-capacity data capabilities, but they lack the coverage, portability, and resilience required for wide-area alerting of large volunteer forces. Contemporary 2-way paging systems perhaps come closest to meeting the alerting needs of public safety agencies. Like 1-way systems, these pagers are small, inexpensive devices that operate for long periods on battery power. However, these systems have no ability to acknowledge group messages.
More importantly, beyond the limitations described above, none of these systems provide a network interface sufficient to support acknowledged group messaging. Requiring that the message originator individually alert each recipient adds considerable setup delay when alerting large groups. This delay is eliminated when using network-supported call group or common address messages, but the message originator must have prior knowledge of group membership. If a message originator does not know the membership of the paged group, there is no context to know whether enough manpower is responding, or whether key individuals have been mobilized. Manually maintaining accurate group membership rosters between networks and message originators would be impractical since this is time consuming, difficult, and prone to errors. For a communications system to provide usable, acknowledged group alerting capabilities to public safety agencies, the network interface must provide group membership details when the group message is sent. Even if the mobile devices were capable of acknowledging group messages, current systems do not provide message originators this membership information regarding the alerted group. Simply guaranteeing that a message will be eventually delivered to all recipients is insufficient for public safety alerting applications. The message originator (dispatcher, incident commander, etc.) needs immediate feedback as to who has been alerted and how they have replied, as well as information concerning those who cannot be reached.
A need therefore exists for a 2-way paging system that could be improved with group message acknowledgement and a suitable system interface. Such a system would address the current shortcomings of public safety alerting systems, and could also provide other benefits. For instance, it could act as an improved personnel accountability system (PAS) for on-scene communications. Incident commanders could instantly notify responders of imminent threats, such as impending chemical release or structure failure, and verify receipt by all personnel. Responses could be expanded to include location information and health or equipment status information. Such systems, made practical because of the high performance and low cost of 2-way pagers, would both obviate traditional problems with interoperable on-scene communications and enable central oversight of critical real-time safety data.
While public safety's need for a system capable of acknowledged group alerting system is clear and well documented in the public record, no such system yet exists but for the present invention described herein.